Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [36]
He thinks a minute and leaves the room. He is gone a long time, and she can hear him moving from room to room upstairs. He returns carrying a white platter with a flat rectangular center and a fine crack running out to a corner.
“My wife used it for roasts,” he says. “I’m never going to cook a roast.”
“I won’t take something that belonged to your wife,” she says.
“I’m selling it for fifteen cents,” he says.
“You wouldn’t be selling it if I hadn’t asked you for it.”
Jack Hess sets the platter down. “Fifteen cents,” he says.
She smiles and relents and gives him the dime and the nickel. She holds the platter under her arm and walks home as fast as a schoolboy who has just bought a jar of marbles might. Once inside, she sets the platter on the kitchen table. She lays out her pieces of sea glass and studies them.
Some are sturdy and some are paper thin. A few tell stories, while others seem more secretive. Many are as beautiful as fine jewelry; others are blunt and ugly. Honora arranges the bits of glass, trying to form a satisfying whole. She puts a dot of cobalt in the center.
She tries to imagine where each piece has come from, who has used the glass and why. Is the blue-violet from a bottle of iodine that was once taken from a medicine cabinet and used for a scraped knee? Is the topaz from a bottle of whiskey tossed overboard by a rumrunner? How long does it take to make a piece of sea glass, anyway — a week, a year, ten years? Was the glass originally that lovely aquamarine color or has the ocean imparted its own stain, as if spewing out calcified bits of itself?
Sometimes she forces herself to remember that sea glass is only other people’s garbage. It is useless, of no value whatsoever. Trash, Sexton once said. And yet, when Honora comes upon a piece of aquamarine or cerulean lying on the sand, she feels she’s found a gem. She picks it up and puts it in her pocket, and on good days, she goes home with heavy pockets.
For a time, Honora thinks about making an object with the glass. A mosaic on a tray of sand. A frame for a mirror. A necklace for her mother. Perhaps she could fill a jar with sea glass and use it as the base of a lamp. But after a few minutes, these ideas always lose their appeal. It’s the individual bits that interest her, the ability to pick them up and let them fall through her fingers and guess at the story behind each one.
Honora cannot find a red, and so the idea of red consumes her for whole days at a time. Logic tells her red is out there, but though she finds pinks and lavenders and yellows, she cannot find a red. Sometimes the sea glass reminds her of gumdrops — grape and lime and lemon. Sugarcoated bits of jelly.
“The only problem with looking for sea glass,” Sexton says one day when he and Honora are walking along the beach, “is that you never look up. You never see the view. You never see the houses or the ocean because you’re afraid you’ll miss something in the sand.”
Vivian
Fog smothers the horizon line, then the ocean, then the beach, until Vivian can hardly see beyond the railing of the porch. It moves as though racing and veers around the corner of the porch. Visiting ghosts, Vivian thinks as she reaches down and scratches Sandy’s neck. With Dickie gone, Sandy hardly ever leaves her side.
Dickie fretted that Vivian would be bored, that she’d have nothing to do. Had to go, he said. Had to travel down to the city to restructure his holdings. The opportunities in the stock market were just too good to pass up right now.
Shoo, shoo, Vivian said to him, pushing him out the door.
A foghorn sounds, and Vivian sees a shape moving through the mist. A woman in a cloth coat.
Dickie needn’t have worried, Vivian thinks. She has not been bored, not for one minute. When Dickie called her that first day to see how she was faring, she could hardly keep contentment from her voice. She hadn’t seen a single soul socially, she told him, nor had she once put on a decent dress. She’d read, she said. And she’d actually cooked a meal. (Not really, Dickie said.) She’d walked down to the